On Mar 13, 2018, at 6:22 PM, Stephen Farrell <stephen.farrell@cs.tcd.ie> wrote:
> I mean, do you *really* think there's any chance of reaching rough
> consensus on the list for this draft? If not, then ISTM you're
> putting meeting attendees and list participants through a bunch
> of pain for no gain.
It's actually worse than that—it costs us time to do this, and those of us who are not given free money to work on stuff like this have to choose between billing for work our employers want us to do, or participating in conversations like this. Today this has cost me several billable hours. When the working group is allowed to continue discussing issues like this that are never going to get consensus, ad infinitum, we have to choose between participating in the discussion, which is just a rehash of the previous discussion, or doing work we can get paid for.
One strategy that's very effective for overcoming resistance to bad ideas is to keep pushing the idea until nobody who's resisting it can afford to continue doing so. So whether or not to allow this conversation to continue is not simply a question of propriety or of protecting the working group's real work, although those are important considerations as well. It really is a violation of the spirit of the consensus process to allow conversations like this to just go on and on and on and on.